I stumbled seriously last week. If it wasn’t the influenza virus, then my fever, malaise and cough arose from a virus very nearly like it. I tried to pretend that it wasn’t the flu. After all, October’s dutiful vaccination should have kept me safe from such infection, although epidemiologists say otherwise (according to the 2/15 MMWR Weekly from the CDC, “vaccine effectiveness for all ages was 46% (30%–58%).” But also to blame for my malaise is The Uninhabitable Earth, a newly released book David Wallace-Wells, which I had pre-ordered and which Amazon promptly delivered to my sick bed. As if glued to the TV by the carnage of a train wreck, I pored over the book’s dark message of the looming catastrophe that is global climate change, very much adding to my flu-induced insomnia. According to the author, the looming global disaster that will inevitably unfold in coming decades is far worse than most of us can imagine. Our society and economy are facing forces of extreme change, for which no historical precedent has prepared us.

In my fevered delirium I had this stream of thought: “Man! DC Water will be sorry it spent a half billion when it will so soon be underwater! it’s all doomed!” This is, after all, what a feverish delirium sounds like.

What might “climate change-minded” biosolids infrastructure look like? Despite all the gloom above, I have been feeling positive about our wastewater and biosolids stewardship from the viewpoint of global sustainability. I have shared in previous TOPICs (“Closing the circle”) how biosolids is front and center of the “Circular Economy.” I was uplifted, too, by The Role of Agroecology in Sustainable Intensification, a U.K. document that connects “ecosystem services” with “global food systems.” Agroecology is “simultaneously raising yields, increasing the efficiency with which inputs are being used and reducing the negative environmental effects of food production.” I think there is plenty of space here for biosolids.

A recent student blog in the American Philosophical Association, “In the Face of Climate Collapse, Resist Hope,” argued that hope and optimism was a barrier to effective response to the challenges. Oh, No! You may have noticed the change in phraseology, away from climate “change” and toward climate “catastrophe” or “collapse.” It is easy, in the throes of fever, to respond to the enervating news of climate change and feel hopeless. But we in the biosolids profession have a tool with which to retain our optimism and to accomplish carbon sequestration, agriculture intensification, and biofuel production. We have Biosolids: Tamiflu for the Climate.